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…theology..has no reason to exist other than to critically accompany the missio Dei.

David Bosch

Prayer needs to carry with it the commitment of our whole being to bring about the just conditions that make prayer possible...

Don Postema, Space for God, p. 158-59

The definition of knowledge is not simply an affair of intelligence; it is an affair of the heart, in the biblical sense of heart as the center and source of the whole inner life in its full complex of thought, desire and moral decision.

John Courtney Murray, The Problem of God, p. 21

'Be careful of words,' Wiesel quotes a learned Rabbi as saying. 'They're dangerous. Be wary of them. They beget either demons or angels. It's up to you to give life to one or the other.'

Great Souls, p. 365

In the 'locus imperii' there is a desperate need for Christians to offer hope and reignite the fires of political imagination and social innovation.

Ched Myers, Who Will Roll Away the Stone? p. 33

“Bad news goes about in clogs, good news in stockinged feet.”

Welsh Proverb, quoted by Rich Stearns 'The Hole in Our Gospel'

'...for when you speak of the Spirit you are dealing with him in whom there are no differences of scale.'

Taylor, The Go-Between God, p. 23

In the New Testament the opposite of spirit is not the material, but the impersonal.

John Leith, Basic Christian Doctrine, p. 162

They sit before you as my people, and they hear what you say but they will not do it; for with their lips they show much love, but their heart is set on their gain.

Ezekiel 33:31

Francis Xavier was the Jesuit director of missions in India, China and Japan in the sixteenth century. He once said that he longed to be back in Paris 'to go shouting up and down the streets to tell the students to give up their small ambitions and come eastward to preach the gospel of Christ.'

Michael C. Griffiths, Give Up Your Small Ambitions, p.6

There is one who pretends to be rich, but has nothing; Another pretends to be poor, but has great wealth.

Proverbs 13:7

The Christian claim is that the Christian faith does more justice to the facts, makes more sense out of life, illuminates life, opens life more to the grace of God that forgives and heals wounded consciences and bruised spirits than does any other faith.

John Leith, Basic Christian Doctrine, p. 7

...it is through conflict and sometimes only through conflict that we learn what our ends and purposes are.

Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virture, p. 164

The history of Western epistemology might be described as the quest for a method of reasoning that assures certain knowledge. But philosophers have now come to the conclusion that there is no way to reason that both extends our knowledge and certifies the results.

Nancey Murphy, Reasoning and Rhetoric in Religion, p. 53

You feel the way you do right now because of the thoughts you are thinking at the moment.

15th March 2013

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In the late 1980’s I was a college grad working with churches on an island called “La Isla del Tigre”. My roommate and I had just finished explaining Christianity to a Honduran couple from one of the villages. We were unprepared for their response. “We have heard that before, but it never made a difference on this island.” And with that comment, a passion was born..

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This passion was rooted in my studies in religion and sociology at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Much of my course work had focused on modern Western critiques of Christianity. The principled arguments of Feuerbach, Freud and Nietzsche were powerful. I could not refute them. But my experience of Christianity through Intervarsity Christian Fellowship on the campus kept me grounded and growing in my faith. Though I could not justify it intellectually, I knew that the story of Christianity was true. It was making a difference in so many people’s lives.

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This tension became clearer, not only in the response of the Honduran couple, but in experiences after that time in Southern African and the United States. I struggled while at Fuller Seminary with a way to speak Christianity with intellectual integrity. Given the TV evangelist scandals of the 80s, the genocides of the 1990s in the wake of the East African revival, and the child sex abuse scandals among Catholic Priests up to the present day the task would be a challenge. As a pastor in Mozambique, South Carolina and Los Angeles I confronted an institutional Christianity that left so many stern, insecure and unloving Christians unchanged and while having a minimal impact upon the communities in which they found themselves. As a father, I worked with my wife to help our two sons develop a faith that is clearly expressed in their character and in their relationships with others. Again and again that persistent question surfaced: “What difference does Christianity make?”

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Wirkungsgeschichte is dedicated to an embodied response to that couple as well as to post-modern Western culture. It says, “Christianity does make a difference. Let me show you what I mean!”